Getting Things Sorted

Over a week into the new year and I haven’t really achieved a lot yet.

I did make a bit of headway into sorting out my spare room/ craft room though. You can at least get to the bed now, if not the desk. I’m going to do you all a favour and not post any pictures of the room in its current state. Instead, I’m going to post some pictures of how I used to have my room set up in our old house.

I’m a big big big fan of these ‘letter drawers’. I usually get mine from Big W for around $25AUD, but sometimes they’re on special and I grab a few more. My collection has grown quite a bit since I took these photos!

I’ve made little labels for the drawer fronts, they come with coloured stickers, but they were a bit too plain for my taste, so I used tiny scraps of polka dot scrapbooking paper and Sakura glaze pens to write the titles on them. They worked when I only had a few drawers, but I haven’t had a chance to re-sort and re-label since my stash has grown. Yet another project for the new year!

This is an old TV cabinet that we had lurking around – it was too small to fit our new tv. A 12″ crate fit nicely in the bottom, and the shelves could be adjusted so that the letter drawers fit on them. The doors hide big messy storage boxes with papers spewing out of them. But no-one needs to see what’s behind closed doors!

A closer view of the TV cabinet. There’s a tiered metal rack that holds plastic envelopes full of scrapbooking papers and odd scraps. I think they’re originally used for filing or for displaying records. I got a whole pile of them from an op-shop for a few dollars and have used them as magazine racks as well.

I had a row of small ikea jars on the top of the cabinet, but I found that I didn’t really have anything that fit in them that didn’t already have a place to live. I ended up mixing up embellishments which was not the greatest idea and took me ages to sort back out again. I still have the jars, but I might use them for something else. Buttons would work well…. any excuse for new things. =)

And he’s my old craft desk. I’ve since gotten a bigger table too, but this served for a while- I just used the floor to hold everything that I wasn’t directly working on. I’m not a big fan of the plastic drawers you can see on the right. They’re great for a while, but if you load them up the way that I do, they end up too heavy for the track they sit in and all fall into each other. It’s not a major problem most of the time, but it can be a little annoying.

Oh, to be that organised in my new house!
I’ll keep you updated on my progress with the new room as I gradually get closer to seeing the desk surface again. At least I think there’s a desk under there – I’m sure I remember moving one in.